THE BELL CURVE:In spring, a man’s fancy turns to baseball

Many years ago, Art Buchwald turned his wonderfully sideways look at current culture on Thanksgiving. The result was a column that caught his feelings so exactly that he simply repeated it annually until he died a few months ago. Without claiming comparable quality, I feel the same way about baseball. I do a column every year celebrating the birth of a new baseball season, and I strive desperately to say something new, but I suspect it always comes out as just more of the same reverence for a cultural icon that doesn’t deserve reverence.

It is mostly owned and operated as an ego trip by rich egocentric males and as a tax write-off for large corporations. It takes place in stadiums paid for mostly by taxpayers and carrying the names of other corporations buying a piece of the action in the hope that the love baseball attracts will rub off on them. At the Major League level, the game is played by multi-millionaires who are paid, even the most humble of them, more than the president of the United States, and some of whom enhance their skills with illegal chemicals.

And I love it. Can’t wait every February until spring training starts, and I know the season will soon begin.

That’s why my daughter, Patt, and I were at Angel Stadium last Saturday night to see the Salt Lake City Angels play the Las Vegas Dodgers. It was a meaningless game, played mostly by 20-something-year-olds who would be sent the next day to join a minor league team. And damned if the stadium wasn’t filled to capacity.

The undemanding state of mind among the 43,000 or so people in attendance — including my daughter and me — was reflected in a fifth-inning hot dog crisis near my one-sixth of a season ticket seat on the top deck behind home plate. I went out for a beer refill, de rigueur at that stage of the game, and found at the nearest concession stand long lines, which I obediently joined. When it finally struck me that the line wasn’t moving, I asked the people ahead of me if they knew why, and they told me it was because the stand was out of hot dogs and they were waiting for a new supply to arrive. There was no loud shouting or threats to boycott the food concessions or — more logically — pulling out of line to look for another stand with hot dogs. Just people waiting — for two innings I was told — for new hot dogs to arrive.

So I got my beer elsewhere and found the same people still in line when I returned to my seat. They may still be in line, as far as I know — just grateful to be there.

So here I am to report on the state of the new baseball season in Anaheim and to psychoanalyze why it has such a grip on otherwise rational people.

What has changed and what hasn’t? First, parking is still $8 at Angel Stadium, in contrast to Dodger Stadium where it is almost twice that. Concession prices for Angel fans also seem pretty much the same. You can still get a small draft beer without refinancing your house. Anaheim also comes out well in two other contrasts: Angels tickets are up, but not as much as they are at Dodger Stadium, and traffic around the Anaheim ballpark — where drivers are left to their own devices and not color coded — is much less bewildering than what Dodgers patrons must endure.

And on the field, Vladimir Guerrero still swings at bad pitches but hits them a mile when he connects, and Frankie Rodriguez still strikes out the side in the ninth inning. Three rookies will be starting for the Angels, and the power hitter that owner Arte Marino was going to get has turned out to be combined in homebody Garret Anderson and a slick-fielding center fielder out of Texas caught up in the fringes of the performance-enhancing issue. So it’s still the pitching, dummy — and the pitching is very good.

It’s hard to avoid metaphysics in trying to psychoanalyze baseball’s grip on people like me. This was less true when I lived in the Midwest, where it was always perfectly clear that the first and most urgent reason I sweated out the beginning of every baseball season was that it offered the only believable certainty that winter was actually going to end. Without that sign, by mid-March we would have been convinced that we were doomed to live in a kind of permanent winter forever. And so, at a very early age, we were seduced annually by the arrival of a new baseball season.

That’s all well and good, but how, then, to explain the same grip it holds on those of us who live year-round in almost perfect baseball weather?

I’ve given this a lot of thought and have finally come to the conclusion that when winter is taken symbolically rather than literally, the answer is clear. Baseball not only offers the promise of splendid weather for many months of the year. It also, each spring, offers a clean slate on which our problems have been erased, thereby offering us the promise of a fresh start. We’re all in first place in early April. All we have to do is win more than we lose to hang onto that edge.

If all this seems like oversimplified nonsense, you have clearly never been present in a ballpark when the home team was down by 10 runs in the bottom of the 9th inning and came back to win. Happens all the time. The Clean Slate Club.

So don’t wait to get on the Angels’ World Series list. You may never get your money back, but you’ll have a shot at a terrific run for the next six months to resolve your problems and get prepared for winter — in whatever form it appears.